USA’s Elite Takes A Dive On Fighting Terror So there’s some people like, you know, frankly, this show, we’re at the adult table of conversation. (The other panelists were NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, National Review editor Rich Lowry, New York Times reporter Helene Cooper, and Islamic Monthly editor Arsalan Iftikhar; anti-Islamist writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was also scheduled but “decided | Read More »

In the 1967 move, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, liberal parents have the depths of their liberalism plumbed when their daughter brings home a black man as her fiance. According to Cass Sunstein, political identity is now a more potent organizing force in society than racism: Researchers have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. | Read More »

I’ll fess up to being a few hundred volumes behind on my Approved Smart Guy™ reading list. If it gets any worse, I won’t be one of The Quiz Kids anymore. One that I can say proudly I’ve caught up on is Bobo’s In Paradise by David Brooks. This book, more than anything I’ve read, makes intelligent use of the intellectual compost referred to euphemistically as Marxian Analysis. Unfortunately, like all other Marxian Analysis, it has its limits as far as describing the real world.

By fortunate happenstance, Marxism isn’t overly fond of private property; intellectual or otherwise. This preference allows the Marxist to hotwire The Hegelian Dialectic and go for epistemological joyrides over surreal terrain. Brooks so endeavors. He describes the Bourgeois-Bohemian (Bobo for short) as a Synthesis between the Bourgeois (Thesis) and Bohemian (Anti-thesis). He then goes further to claim that this union of Bacchus and Prometheus is a stable configuration that will define American high culture over the next few passing decades.

Brooks has a quick-footed wit that avoids paradox and fallacy the way Adrian Peterson weaves a broken field towards the end zone. However, his project is limited by the same problems that lay to nines canonical believers in overdetermining history such as Marx, Hegel, and Oswald Spengler. Not everything is evolutionary. Some things are canonical and binary. They exist or they don’t exist. They equal 1 or they equal zero. They are categorically discrete and there is no uncountable infinity between these two states. A synthesis between 1 and 0 equal to 0.425 is not a logically possible member of the subset.

David Brooks is very upset at all those recalcitrant Republicans elected in 2010. “What’s going on in the House, and a bit in the Senate, too, is what you might call the rise of Ted Cruz-ism,” Brooks said. “And Ted Cruz, the senator from Canada through Texas, is basically not a legislator in the normal sense, doesn’t have an idea that he’s going to Congress | Read More »

Has David Brooks finally been able to break the hypnotism of the crease? On Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour on PBS, a show that seems to have a fondness for inviting him on when they need a “conservative” to slap around, he said: “I sort of think this debate hurts both candidates,” Brooks said Friday on PBS’s “NewsHour.” “I think Bain is not popular. It is not | Read More »

Four years ago Peggy Noonan was one of a group of erstwhile Republicans who succumbed in varying degrees to the Cult of Obama. Noonan, who’s claim to fame rests entirely on having written some very good speeches for President Reagan, also saw fit to join in the general trashing of Sarah Palin in her newly assumed position of “thinking conservative”. Now after three years of | Read More »

“David Brooks, please look up Godwin’s Law.”David Brooks seems to forget it was the tea party movement that handed the Republicans control of the House in 2010. Today he laments the rise, again, of conservatives and views his ideological drift to the left as standing still with conservatism moving away from him. He really does lack serious self-awareness.How silly.In a column titled The Possum Republicans | Read More »

“David Brooks, please look up Godwin’s Law.”David Brooks seems to forget it was the tea party movement that handed the Republicans control of the House in 2010. Today he laments the rise, again, of conservatives and views his ideological drift to the left as standing still with conservatism moving away from him. He really does lack serious self-awareness.How silly.In a column titled The Possum Republicans | Read More »

I could hardly sum up more pithily the problem with Mitt Romney’s candidacy in four words than “David Brooks loves him.” Brooks’ column today is revealingly out of step with the party and the nation Romney is seeking to lead. Let’s start with what’s missing from Brooks’ description of the job Romney is applying for: [T]he challenges ahead are technically difficult. There’s a reason that | Read More »

I could hardly sum up more pithily the problem with Mitt Romney’s candidacy in four words than “David Brooks loves him.” Brooks’ column today is revealingly out of step with the party and the nation Romney is seeking to lead. Let’s start with what’s missing from Brooks’ description of the job Romney is applying for: [T]he challenges ahead are technically difficult. There’s a reason that | Read More »

AIM on Facebook | Twitter From Accuracy in Media’s Michael Watson: In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, columnist David Brooks (allegedly a conservative) asserted that “there are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues [i.e., tax rates].” Brooks claims that the “Republican Party may no | Read More »

It is a familiar tactic that the Democrats have used lately — say it enough times and hope someone believes it. I was traveling yesterday and couldn’t comment on the David Brooks column, but it is more and more clear David Brooks got played. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion | Read More »

It is a familiar tactic that the Democrats have used lately — say it enough times and hope someone believes it. I was traveling yesterday and couldn’t comment on the David Brooks column, but it is more and more clear David Brooks got played. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion | Read More »

We know from the Dem ObamaCare cliff-jumping exercise, that the Dems listen to, and do as they are told by the mainstream media. But the cracks in the ObamaCare-hold-hands-and-sing-kum-bah-ya-love-fest are now beginning to be hard for the MSM to ignore. First, Kate Pickert of TIME magazine wrote a piece that argued the Dems have fallen into a trap by passing ObamaCare, and that politically, things | Read More »

Today i read a story in the New York Times that I was absolutely thrilled by, but politically it scared me a little. The article discusses the Obama administration weighing tax reform. The treasury department is supposedly looking at options to get rid of a number of deductions and lowering the marginal rates to split the difference and keep payments equal while broadening the tax | Read More »